All posts tagged "media fast"

I didn't give up television. I don't watch television, so there was nothing to give up. I didn't give up radio, because I don't think my radio use has ever been a problem for me. You don't while away the hours just listening to the radio, at least I don't. For me the radio is how I make mundane tasks that need doing more bearable.

What I gave up was Twitter and Facebook, the crack cocaine and crystal meth of the internet. I gave up online news sites and political blogs. And then I broadened the scope to include Public Address System, and Metafilter, two community sites where I found myself posting and commenting and reloading and reloading and reloading. I felt I had a problem, and I needed to do something about it.

It was good. I wrote things, I read books, I played music and practised instruments, and accomplished a lot else besides. It's possible I actually had mood improvements too -- I was pleased about all the things I was doing, and not depressed by hearing a lot of horrible news about people I don't know and situations I can't fix.

Then I stopped. I mean, I had to, to find out what would happen, didn't I? I promised I would write about it, but I didn't. Well, now I am.

What happened is that I did achieve some sort of control over the monkey-minded clicking. I continued to get things done. But not as much as before. I can go hours at a time without checking Twitter, days without looking at Facebook. Many times I find myself half way through a page, perhaps some more or less worthy piece from Arts And Letters Daily, say, and I ask myself "is this improving my life?" And then I go do something else. But I have never stopped mousing around looking for something to read in the first place.

The pile of unread books has grown higher, the list of unfinished projects longer.

So yeah, I'm doing it again. If not fasting, then dieting. Of course I'll still read your blog. It's essential. But I'm cutting out all that other crap. Life is too short.

I meant to add a bit more last night, but I was too zonked to think clearly about it.

Postman seems to say that with television, the entertainment via an ever-changing sequence of blocks that cause emotional stimulation is the thing. (This is why news shows need theme music and expressive newsreaders -- without the music and the mugging for the camera, you'd have to figure out how to respond to the news yourself, and that wouldn't be so entertaining).

For me web browsing is similar, but different in an important way. There's still an ever-changing sequence, and there's still a lack of connection and context. Eg, sites like Metafilter (or digg or Fark or YouTube or BoingBoing or even the highbrow Arts and Letters Daily) present us with one thing after another, with no connecting thread of argument or thought. Sometimes, what they present is thematically connected, but often it's not. In contrast to television the entertainment is often not in the emotional content, but in the receipt of a novel packet of information. The text can be dense, the sense rich.

Last week I got a 30% off voucher from Borders, so I wandered down to see whether I could find anything I wanted. This violates my usual book buying policy, which is recherché books online, bestsellers at Borders, and browsing at Unity. But... 30% off.

I ended up with a copy of Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death.

I first encountered Postman when I acquired a copy of a lecturer's course notes while working as an IT support person at the School of Education at the University of Waikato. In those days, there were still some hardy Marxists who had survived the merger of the university's Department of Education with Hamilton Teachers' College, and I would talk with them as I fixed their computers. (For all I know they are still locking horns with their vocationally orientated colleagues, and I hope so.) Anyway, these notes contained a lengthy and fascinating excerpt from this book, which has been on my "must read someday" list ever since.

Postman's argument goes more or less like this:

different media favour different modes of discourse

print favours sequential, logical argument and dense information

electronic media, starting with the telegraph and culminating in television, favour disconnected snippets, light on information, chosen largely for emotional impact, and produced for entertainment above all else (the book predates widespread internet by more than a decade)

television as the dominant medium has a devastating effect on public discourse, as it replaces argument with entertainment

this is why politicians' policy positions have become subordinate to their ability to connect emotionally with the public on camera

There's more to it than that, of course.

Postman's account of the news show as vaudeville performance, whose reference to real events is only for the purpose of stimulating entertaining emotion, is as true now as it was when he wrote it. His description of the weakening attention span of the public -- from the book-reading, lecture-attending, Sitzfleisch of the 19th century to the channel-surfing 20 second boredom -- is damning.

At the end of the book, he suggests that there are two answers, one nonsensical, one desperate. The nonsensical one would be to start producing shows that deconstruct television, showing the audience how it manipulates their emotions and constructs argument out of nothing more that sequences of shots. He argues that such a show would have to be itself entertaining, or it could never be funded and broadcast, and that it would be funny along the lines of Monty Python and other shows that mocked television convention. "In order to command an audience large enough to make a difference, one would have to make the programs vastly amusing, in the television style. Thus the act of criticism itself would, in the end, be co-opted by television. The parodists would become celebrities..." Well, hello Jon Stewart.

The desperate answer, according to Postman, would be to add education about the workings of television to the school curriculum. I have no idea whether this has happened or not, but I think that's what the fuddy duddy complaints about media literacy in the English syllabus are about. But judging purely by, say, the content of the comments on the NZ Herald site and Stuff, it's not working.

In summary, Amusing Ourselves to Death is a depressing read.

I find it interesting to try to extend the book's message to the web-dominated milieu I live in. I've forsaken the emotional farce of "serious" television for the textual web. It's hopeful, isn't it, that densely argued text is fighting a rear-guard action against television? I don't know. LOLcats and Youtube make that a dubious position to hold.

But anyway, I've decided to extend my entertainment fast a little further. I have held out against Twitter and Facebook quite happily, but that still leaves massive gobblers of my attention: certain blogs and news sites I find myself checking multiple times a day, like Metafilter and Public Address System. I'm taking a break from them for a while too. At least until March. Maybe longer. I've been getting my willpower muscle back into shape, and now I'm going to exercise it a bit harder.

I have hinted recently that my use of the web has been troubling me; that use might have become abuse.

From a very young age I have had an excellent memory for interesting facts. By "interesting" I mean that I could remember facts such as the name Iguanadon comes from the Greek words for "Iguana tooth" -- INTERESTING -- but not it is a good idea to take something to blow your nose in when you go out for the day -- UNINTERESTING.

I wasn't surprised when I learned later in life that creating associations between things in your mind is a classic memory technique, because that's how my mind has worked my whole life. For me, retrieving a fact has always been like pulling a chain of links, or maybe tugging on... a web, navigating from something immediately in mind to something in the mental distance. I am sure this is why I have a lot of trouble telling the plain facts instead of a lot of long rambling stories. I want to lay out how a fact sits in my memory, describe the surrounding landscape, plot a chart to it. A bare fact on its own seems awfully lonely and isolated and how could anyone remember it if it's not tied down to other things?

~Digression~

Do you remember the Pogues song, Navigator?

Navigator, navigator, rise up and be strong

The morning is here and there's work to be done

Take your pick and your shovel and the bold dynamite

And we'll shift a few tons of this earthly delight

A navigator is someone who worked on navigations -- canals -- hence the word "navvy."

I feel that I have been a navigator of the Internet, not in the sense of a plotter of courses, but as a constructor of pathways. There are a lot of online things New Zealanders use that I had a hand in. And when I was a-building of them, I was good at it because I was using them as heavily as I could. Looking back, though that use helped me, it cost me too.

~Resumption~

This trait of pursuing ostensibly useless things and joining them up with known things has generally served me very well. It made a lot of tedious busywork fly past at school and university. It gave me a superficial grasp of a wide range of useful topics, linguistic, culinary, electronic, horticultural, you name it. Except for sport, don't ask me why. As a musician I can learn new tunes very quickly; as a programmer I can digest the fibrous lumps of new programming languages and business requirements without too much effort. My chosen pursuits and my abilities have been well-aligned.

Unfortunately, this is an ability that's becoming more and more useless. Anyone can google up a reasonable grasp of a new subject these days. There's no point in remembering things. The web can remember it for you wholesale. But it's worse than that. Building webs of facts in my head is a habit. And now that I have the web, it has got out of control.

I was using the Internet, in the form of Usenet news, long before most people I know. Even then I was gulping down newsgroup FAQs and polling my newsreader for new messages relentlessly. Once the web came into being, I found myself clicking around in the way we all know now. "How do you know that?" "Oh, I read about it somewhere." I enjoyed the kudos of coming up with entertainingly recherche information, but mostly I just liked learning things. Perhaps I am a coalmine canary. I've had on-tap broadband internet for most of my waking life since 1994, which give me 5-10 years on most people I know. Maybe five or ten years from now, there will be special social agencies dealing with the internet-troubled.

I read somewhere recently -- I can't remember where now, and I'm NOT going to look for it -- that some researcher somewhere has discovered you get a lovely little dopamine buzz when you learn a new thing that fits into a pattern. Well, hello, addiction through intermittent reinforcement. Twitter and Facebook, which always change (check, check, checkity-check) and have the added layer of peer pressure, just make it worse.

Clicky, clicky. Maybe this link will get me a food pellet.

~Digression ~

A decade and more ago, I spent a lot of time travelling with a band, playing in all sorts of places. I got to have a sort of feel for pubs and bars. I dreaded the ones run by old coots spending their retirement or redundancy savings, and worst of all the ones run by real alcoholics. If you want to run a bar, you need to drink, and you need to like drinking, but you can't let drinking be your whole desire, or your bar will run to ruin.

~Resumption~

"Alcoholism is a disease, but it's the only one you can get yelled at for having. 'Damn it, Otto, you're an alcoholic.' 'Damn it, Otto, you have lupus.' One of those two doesn't sound right. -- Mitch Hedburg"

People sometimes use the word "addiction". I think this is unhelpful. Addiction, properly understood, is when a chemical has turned your body against you. Thus alcoholics and opiate addicts suffer from a medical condition, and cannot give up cold turkey without severe physical reactions that require medical supervision. The internet habit is merely a bad habit, in fact in some contexts a good and beneficial habit, but at any rate merely a behaviour that we can seek to modify without fear of hurting ourselves.

On the other hand, what are we to make of phenomena like gambling addiction? Aren't gambling addicts people for whom operant conditioning is just a little bit more effective than the rest of us?

Anyway, it's a hard habit to break when both ones employment and modern life in general mean it is not merely available but unavoidable for many hours of the day. I am a programmer, and I build web things. I know I've just said alcoholism is a bad analogy, but could you give up the drink so easily if you were a professional distiller? (Years ago I was told that the manager of the AFFCO freezing works at Horotiu was a vegetarian, but I never verified this. I suppose it's not really parallel anyway.)

Am I suffering? You should ask. Maybe this is fun. The earth is filled with many people who would love to spend all day on a padded chair, compared to what they do now. At that level, no, I'm not suffering. On the other hand, I feel there are other things I would rather be doing, if I weren't just absorbing other people's words. Lots of other things.

I am not good at listening to complaints from other people without offering advice.

(Supposedly this is a male trait, if you believe that Men Are From Mars and Women Are From Venus. This is bullshit. Dude got his PhD from a cereal packet. We are all from Earth.)

What I have done is this. I am refactoring my habits. People in other professions no doubt have better metaphors, but I am a programmer and refactoring is what we do with things that kind of work but not terribly well.

So I have written down a non-judgmental chronological list of things I do all day. Interwob blobbing has been too large a part of that list. Then I have written down a description of how I might rearrange things so that said blobbing would be a treat, rather than a thing in itself. And lo, I have got a lot more things done. I'm not into busy-ness for its own sake, so let me tell you that those things were things I wanted to do, things that improved my life, not things that I did just because some brain cells I don't even know personally told me to do them.

Once, maybe ten years ago, I observed that the sun was over the yardarm, so one might allow oneself a wee dram, to which my friend Rodger replied that people who need rules about when they can drink are people who have problems with alcohol. Over the years, I have come to realise that although I am not one of those people who have problems with alcohol, I do not have the innate self-restraint of a Rodger -- in fact I do need rules about when I can do certain things, either because I have otherwise uncontrollable urges, or because this is the only useful way I can manifest self-control. And I'm not ashamed. It's what I need to do, to do things I like more in the long term than the short term, and that's how I am. I really wish this wasn't so, and I think this is one of the great unsolved problems of philosophy -- why do we have conflicting notions of our own good, how do we distinguish the apparently good from the really good. And the non-philosophical -- having identified our own best interest, how do we act on it? I am frankly quite flummoxed to be this old and still be dealing with this, when it appears that other people I know are just charging ahead free of doubt and guilt and temptation. (I say "appear" because I hope, for my own selfish gratification, that they are in fact suffering from a bit of doubt and guilt and temptation and are just putting up a good front).

I owe a lot to the internet: a job, a way of life, a lot of friends, the love of my life, and I am honestly very grateful. I am just trying to school myself about what I need to pay attention to, and what to leave for later. To start with, it was all worth paying attention to, and I didn't need to discriminate, and now I find myself having to learn what other people could see from the very start.

I'm taking a leave of absence from Facebook and Twitter. They drain my attention and focus way too much. So I'm going cold turkey for a while. Maybe I'll come back when I have a few other things under control.

One thing I do intend to do more of this year is blogging. Another side-effect of Twitter and Facebook is they seem to leach all the impetus away from ideas -- one tweet and they're done and I never get around to developing them into anything.